Career

DeMarcus was a member of the band East to West, early 1990s; DeMarcus and
Rooney were members of Chely Wright's touring band, 1990s; formed
Rascal Flatts, c. 1999; released debut album,
Rascal Flatts
, 2000; released
Melt
, 2002; released
Feels Like Today
, 2004; released
Me and My Gang
, 2006.

Awards:
New vocal group of the year, Academy of Country Music, 2001; vocal group
of the year, Country Music Association, 2003; vocal group of the year,
Academy of Country Music, 2003, 2004 and 2005; vocal group of the year,
Country Music Association, 2004; vocal group of the year, Academy of
Country Music, 2004; breakthrough act,
Billboard
Touring Awards, 2005; vocal group of the year, Country Music Association,
2005; vocal group of the year, Academy of Country Music, 2005; country
artist of the year,
Billboard
, 2005; Grammy Award for country song of the year, Recording Academy, for
"Bless the Broken Road," 2006.

Sidelights

In April of 2006, Chris Willman of
Entertainment Weekly
declared that Rascal Flatts was "America's most popular
band." The young country music trio certainly had the record sales
to claim that title. All 13 of its singles had hit the top ten on the
Billboard
county chart, and five had gone to No. 1. By the summer of 2006, the
group, known for its heartfelt, emotional songs and three-part harmonies,
had sold almost nine million records and was one of the top-grossing
touring bands in the United States. Never accepted by their more
traditional country music peers, the band still struggled to defy the
label the press placed on them when they debuted in 2000: that they were
the country equivalent of a boy band.

Rascal Flatts began as a family affair. Jay DeMarcus and Gary LeVox are
second cousins who grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and used to sing and play
together at family get-togethers. DeMarcus' parents were full-time
musicians in Columbus. In the early 1990s, DeMarcus joined the Christian
band East to West and moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to pursue a music
career. There, he got a job leading the backup band of contemporary
country singer Chely Wright.

In 1997, DeMarcus convinced his cousin to join him in Nashville. When
DeMarcus was not on the road, he, LeVox and a guitarist performed together
regularly at a Nashville country-music club called the Fiddle and Steel
Guitar Bar. One night, when their regular guitarist could not play,
DeMarcus invited Joe Don Rooney, his bandmate in Wright's touring
group, to sit in. The three men quickly discovered their voices formed
natural three-part harmonies. "Gary is such a great singer, and Joe
Don naturally sings the high part over Gary," their co-manager,
Doug Nichols, told Ken Tucker of
Billboard
. "It's naturally where his voice is. Jay sings the fifth
below, which is naturally where his voice is. You can't go find
three people like that."

The trio sent a well-produced, market-ready three-song demo to Lyric
Street Records, which signed them in the summer of 1999. The record
company moved quickly to record and release the band's first album.
The band and their producers were good at delivering catchy songs, and the
label was afraid that, after word of the signing spread, other male
country trios might appear quickly and debut first. By early in 2000,
Rascal Flatts was visiting country radio stations, singing and trying to
get airplay for the first album. The self-titled album spawned four
singles that broke onto country radio, "Prayin' for
Daylight" and "This Everyday Love" (which were both
on their original demo), "While You Loved Me," and
"I'm Movin' On." The latter, considered a
risky single to release because it was a ballad, touched a nerve with
listeners. "We got letters and still receive e-mails on that song,
how it's changed people's lives and [helped them] get over
alcohol and depression," Rooney told
Billboard
's Tucker. "It's wonderful to know that your music
can be a healer like that."

The singles quickly hit the country chart. But neither music critics nor
country traditionalists welcomed the band warmly. Rascal Flatts became
tagged as a country version of a boy band, a young pop group singing light
songs for women. "Rascal Flatts first hit in the spring of 2000,
just as pop's boy-band craze started to wane—even though
some country labels were still trying to cash in on the fad,"
explained Brian Mansfield of
USA Today
. "Rascal Flatts—with clean-cut looks, showy vocals and
pop-influenced arrangements—quickly found fans, as well as
detractors willing to lump them with the boy-band knockoffs." For
some country fans, the lead singer's voice may have been part of
the problem. "LeVox's singing style didn't hark back
to any traditional country archetypes," Mansfield wrote. "It
was an unusual combination of nasal, bluegrass-bred tone and phrasing
patterned after R&B singers such as Stevie Wonder and Peabo
Bryson." The band and their record company tried to counter the boy
band label by offering a live concert show to the country-music cable
station CMT.
The special, "Rascal Flatts: Live From the Sunset Strip,"
showed off their abilities as musicians and started an ongoing
relationship with CMT that has been fruitful for the band. In an unusual
move, the band has even released videos for album tracks that were never
released as singles, as a way to boost album sales.

Melt
, Rascal Flatts' second album, was released in 2002. The band
promoted it by headlining a tour sponsored by CMT. One single from the
album, "These Days," hit No. 1 on the country chart. A
reviewer for
Billboard
pronounced
Melt
better than the band's debut, thanks to stronger song quality,
good arrangements and impressive harmonies. The band's steamy video
for another single, "I Melt," attracted notoriety and
publicity, since it included a brief shot of Rooney nude from behind and
suggestive shots of a female model playing his girlfriend. (CMT blurred
out Rooney's buttocks when it showed the video during the day.)
"We wanted to get the best, classy interpretation of the song that
we could possibly do," DeMarcus told Mansfield of
USA Today
. "It's a sexy song. It's about preparing to love on
your significant other." Another successful strategy the band
pursued was touring as an opening act for country stars such as Brooks
& Dunn in 2002, Toby Keith in 2003, and Kenny Chesney in 2004, even
after they proved capable of headlining tours on their own, and after the
fall 2002 CMT tour sold out in several cities.

The band cites various influences on their sound. LeVox, the lead
vocalist, mentions classic country singer George Jones as well as soul
singer Stevie Wonder, while Rooney, the guitarist, cites both country
guitar virtuoso Chet Atkins and rock guitarists Eric Clapton and Jeff
Beck. All three band members are influenced by the hugely popular country
band Alabama. That loyalty may have attracted the attention of one of
their heroes. "Randy Owen from Alabama grabbed me by the shoulders
at the CMA Awards in New York," DeMarcus told
USA Today
's Mansfield. "He said, 'I'm not going to BS
you, buddy. Nobody likes you. Everybody hates you. You're just
taking over the spot we were in 20 years ago.'" Though each
Rascal Flatts album has included some songs the band members wrote, they
also sing many songs by other writers, a decision that often means a band
gets less respect from critics. "You start getting into trouble as
an artist when you say, 'We're only going to record things
that we've written,' especially when you live in a town
where some of the greatest songwriters in the world live," LeVox
told
Billboard
's Tucker. "Our egos aren't the ones speaking.
It's our hearts."

The 2004 album
Feels Like Today
, like its predecessors, generated several hit singles. One, the
tear-jerker "Skin (Sarabeth)," told the story of a
high-school student fighting off cancer who is afraid to go to her prom
since her treatments have left her bald, until her date arrives with his
head shaved. Several country stations played it during telethons to raise
donations for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis,
Tennessee. Critics alternately described the song as powerful and
over-the-top maudlin. Around this time, the band's huge popularity
was increased by the hit pop-singer-audition show
American Idol
. Two of its country-influenced stars, Carrie Underwood and Josh Gracin,
sang Rascal Flatts songs on the show. However, critical opinion was still
against them.

People
reviewer Ralph Novak, for instance, gave
Feels Like Today
only two stars. While acknowledging that the boy-band comparison was not
entirely fair—all three members "are much better singers
than the 'N Sync/Backstreet Boys crowd," he
wrote—Novak complained that LeVox was totally unsubtle and that the
band's songs had "a treacly, dispirited sameness."
Darryl Morden of the
Hollywood Reporter
saw a Rascal Flatts show in Los Angeles in 2005 and left unimpressed.
"The music falls flat," he declared. "It's
country for people who don't want real country." The
band's sound owed more to bland 1980s rock than classic country,
Morden argued, and an encore medley of rock hits convinced him that the
band was superficial. During Bruce Springsteen's "Born in
the U.S.A.," he wrote, "De-Marcus asked whether the audience
was proud to be American"—not realizing, Morden noted, that
"Born in the U.S.A." is a bitter song about an unemployed
Vietnam veteran who feels left behind after returning from the war.

For their fourth album,
Me and My Gang
, instead of working with their longtime producers, Mark Bright and Marty
Williams, Rascal Flatts hired veteran session guitarist Dann Huff as
producer. "Sometimes in this business you can sit idle for too
long, and we kind of felt like we were sitting idle," Rooney told
Tucker of
Billboard
. "We were having success and were in a good place, but still felt
like something needed to give or be inspired, really. It was nothing
against them, it was just that we wanted to go another direction."

Huff worked to make the new album sound more like Rascal Flatts'
sound in concert. He also encouraged the band to take new musical risks.
After mostly singing and not playing his guitar much on the first three
albums, Rooney played all nine guitar solos on
Me and My Gang
, in part thanks to instruction from Huff. "He brought more out of
me than I ever could have done without him," Rooney told
USA Today
's Mansfield.

In 2006, to support
Me and My Gang
, Rascal Flatts mounted another huge tour, with stops at several large
amphitheaters. Of the 24 shows in the tour's first leg, 21 were
sellouts. "We're really arena guys," Rooney told Ray
Waddell of
Billboard
. "There's something about the energy that's captured
in an arena setting." The band also continued to play state fairs,
popular venues for country bands. One reviewer was unimpressed with the
New York show on the tour, though. Kelefa Sanneh of the
New York Times
noted that LeVox took many trips backstage and seemed to have trouble
sustaining his voice for a whole song. "From the start something
wasn't quite right: He would murmur a few lines, find his voice in
time to deliver a few big notes, then ask the audience to fill in the
gaps," Sanneh wrote. De-Marcus took over the spotlight at one point
by taking over the drums to play a solo, then singing the Eagles song
"Hotel California."

The band members have often spoken bitterly about the press'
insistence on calling them a boy band, and their hopes of transcending
that pigeonhole. To be sure, there are a few exceptions to the critical
disdain. Chuck Taylor of
Billboard
, for one, raved about the No. 1 single "What Hurts the
Most," praising its melody and calling its vocals passionate.
"one of the best songs we've heard this year," he
wrote.
Billboard
's Michael Paoletta declared that Rascal Flatts "showcase
mighty chops." Yet some press still dislike them for the softness
of their music. The fact that women outnumber men about 15 to 1 among
Rascal Flatts concert ticket-buyers does not help them shake their
reputation.
Entertainment Weekly
's Chris Hillman gave
Me and My Gang
a grade of C for a near-lack of memorable hooks. "Spectacularly
wimpy," the
New York Times
' Sanneh called the band while reviewing the album.

In April of 2006, Rooney married a
Playboy
Playmate of the Year, Tiffany Fallon. The wedding took place in San Jose
del Cabo, Mexico, and Rascal Flatts performed at the reception.
(DeMarcus' wife, whom he married in 2004, is a former Miss
Tennessee. LeVox is also married, and has two daughters, Brittany and
Brooklyn.) As 2006 progressed, DeMarcus produced an album by longtime
classic-pop-rock stars Chicago. Rooney was pursuing a side project with a
band in Los Angeles, California. The band was preparing to star in a
television concert to celebrate the start of the 2006 National Football
League season.